Who? What? Why? Where? When? How?

Menu

Quick bites: Tracking LA’s food trucks

What do space travel and eating at a food truck have in common? You have to keep adjusting your coordinates to be successful at either.

Los Angeles has plenty of great restaurants, and I’m happy to say quite a few are not too far from where I live. But this city (and the rest of Southern California for that matter) has become famous in the last decade for its food trucks.

More than 200 circulate on any given day, and serve every cuisine under the sun. Some specialize in variations of single items, like cupcakes, gelato, grilled cheese sandwiches and sliders.

I’m particularly intrigued by the Gravy Train Poutinerie, which makes Canada’s signature French fry with cheese curds and gravy dish. (I once looked up poutine on Google, and, next to pictures of fries, were several shots of Vladimir Putin shirtless on a horse. It seems more ominous now, what with the whole Ukraine crisis.)

That truck was on my community college’s campus one afternoon. Unfortunately, I was about to go to class, and I didn’t think the professor would approve of my chowing down while she explained integrals.

I have hoped to come across the Gravy Train Poutinerie since, but have had no luck. For that matter, I haven’t been able to eat at any other trucks, because they never seem to stop in my neighborhood. Or if they do, I don’t know about it until they’ve moved on. So that’s why I connect them to space travel. Like planets, they’re always on the go.

Happily, though, I’ve managed to find a few sites on the Internet that track the trucks. One is Roaming Hunger, the other Find LA Food Trucks. Of course, that doesn’t do me much good when the delicious cupcakes are an hour’s drive away. But I have faith that some day, they’ll be around the corner.

Now, I need to get to the market. Here’s hoping it’s still in the same place as it was yesterday.

All text copyrighted by A.K. Whitney, and cannot be used without permission.